Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

A number of plates were therefore hammered from small nuggets of native gold from various localities, and most of them showed the excretion of minute globules when heated to a dull red. None of these showed any trace of the purple film, however, and I wrote to Mr. Lucas asking for specimens of native Egyptian gold. The single specimen which he sent gave globules, but no purple film. This gold was, however, embedded in quartz, and unsuitable for immediate fashioning into ornaments. Alluvial gold may very probably have been imported from Abyssinia, where the placer deposits are still worked, and it would be extremely interesting to see whether the purple color would appear on plates hammered from nuggets from this or from other possible sources of ancient Egyptian gold. On the whole, I favored the theory that the sequins were hammered from nuggets of native gold containing a trace of iron, one of which was accidentally dropped into a fire, or perhaps heated for annealing, with the resulting discovery of the purple color.

A complete survey of the gold deposits of Abyssinia was under way in 1932, and I wrote to Mr. E. A. Colson, president of the Bank of Addis Ababa, asking for small nuggets from different localities. These he mailed to me from time to time, and all yielded globules, but none the purple film. I had explained to him that should a sample ever be found containing iron it might prove to be a valuable clue in locating the rich deposits worked in ancient times. Mussolini, however, stopped the game just as it was getting under way, and Mr. Colson died shortly after.

* * *

Some of the sequins made by Dr. Wood are now in the Cairo Museum along with the originals. His solution of the mystery is embalmed in the British Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Chapter Seventeen.

Wood as a Debunker of Scientific Cranks and Frauds — and His War with the Mediums

Dr. Wood has had a long career, dating back beyond the days of Blondlot’s “N rays” and the American visit of Eusapia Palladino, in the exposure of frauds and delusions, whether emanating from supposedly scientific laboratories or from mediumistic cabinets.

In the investigation of doubtful phenomena, he is neither academic nor tame nor conventional. In the case of the famous “N ray”, he made a trip to the University of Nancy, and dramatically exposed the most extraordinary scientific delusion of modern times. When Grindell Matthews came over from England with his “death ray” and was trying to induce our government to buy it for the navy, the Associated Press asked Wood to look into it. Wood “looked into it” and gave the press a scathing broadside in which he compared Matthews, “whether self-deluded or not”, to “promotors who try to sell Brooklyn bridges to innocent bystanders”.

In the Palladino investigation, in which he was a member of the committee appointed under the auspices of the Scientific American, he employed X rays and also an ingenious “Venetian-blind” arrangement by which the floor of the medium’s cabinet was illuminated without her knowledge. In the later case of Margery, the Harvard-investigated medium, he seized hold of and pinched — her ectoplasm!

In Wood’s opinion, these scientific leaders up false alleys divide sharply into two categories — self-deluded cranks and downright frauds. The former honestly imagine they have an idea and can make a fortune for themselves and others if they get the backing. The impostors usually set up a tiny but elaborate apparatus worked by trickery, with the hope of impressing some gullible capitalist who might advance them a lot of money to carry out the “idea” on a grander scale. Both categories are old as the hills and perennial as the daisies. Last summer Wood was being urged to investigate a man who claimed he could run a farm tractor by wireless power, with waves from a station a hundred miles distant. He also, of course, had a “death ray”. They always have “death rays”. He had a promotor who’d been pestering the great physicist, and who insisted he had seen a duck brought down from an elevation of eight hundred feet.

“Investigating such people”, said Wood, “is often amusing, but generally a waste of time. The bigger, more serious cases are different”,

Here is Wood’s own account of what was probably the greatest scientific delusion of our time.